The 21-year-old Seattle native catapulted his way to at least temporary rock stardom in Dallas this month, where he came out on top of professional gamers playing "Guitar Hero II" in the World Series of Video Games.

Wong will face off against challengers in August in Toronto at the next World Series of Video Gaming, a fairly new series of competitions broadcast on CBS featuring the games "World of Warcraft," "Quake 4," "Fight Night Round 3" and "Guitar Hero II" -- a game played using a guitar-shaped controller with the objective of accurately playing notes to songs that are displayed onscreen.

The World Series of Video Games stages several competitions a year in cities such as Los Angeles and Toronto and at the DreamHack festival in Jönköping, Sweden. Anyone can compete in the competition, though about 40 percent of participants fly in to compete, and the top four players in each game advance to the next round.

Several friends chipped in to fly Wong to Dallas for the July 5-8 competition, but this time he'll be able to pay his own way with a $1,000 traveling stipend and $2,625 in winnings.

In the University District house where Wong is staying this summer, he and two of his roommates lolled around one day last week in a room punctuated by a TV, a fireplace no one uses and a suspiciously conspicuous large shopping cart that somehow rolled inside.

On that humid afternoon, Wong demonstrated the game with a child-size plastic guitar he took from a basket next to the TV. He pushed a button on a PlayStation 2 and stood facing the scrolling fret board on the screen, his body pulsing to the rhythm of Bang Camaro's "Push Push (Lady Lightning)."

Roommate Daniel Otero looked up from fiddling around on a real guitar. Wong is known to combine windmill spins, Angus Young-inspired struts, behind-the-head finger-play and skyward leaps during the course of the same song.

"Hey, man, move that rug before he slips," Otero said in a weary voice to Chase Eddy, another roommate.

With an expression that implied, "Yeah, I've seen this routine before," Eddy pushed a striped rug out from under Wong's airborne skate shoes.

For Wong, playing "Guitar Hero" has always just been something to do with his roommates, so the concept of playing video games professionally still boggles his mind. Though competitive gaming may seem surreal, some say it's on its way to joining skateboarding and surfing as a viable and lucrative alterna-sport, with gamers raking in thousands of dollars in prizes, not to mention traveling stipends and proceeds from merchandise endorsements and sales.

In 2006, Walsh signed a $250,000 contract with the console gaming league Major League Gaming. Wendel, who once won $150,000 in a tournament, is known for his line of professional gaming merchandise.

But at this point, Wong isn't very keen or confident about joining their ranks.

"I just don't think I could compete with some of these guys," he said. "And it's just a game, you know?"

Wong's win in Dallas earlier this month wasn't the first time he showed up on the gaming radar. He caused a mild sensation in the past year with a video posted on YouTube -- the first time he showed off his rock-star flair with "Guitar Hero II."

The video starts with Wong climbing off a motorcycle in his living room. He's wearing a shimmering red shirt and has chains draped around his neck and across his chest.

"A lot of people have asked me about the chains," Wong says in a voice that's a little more guttural than his own. "The reason I have them on is my soul is just so blisteringly fast that if I didn't keep them tied down somehow, it might impregnate women."

As of Monday, the video had been viewed more than 2,284,000 times and had more than 13,607 comments.

Wong discovered in Dallas earlier this month that the video had a cultlike following online. People approached him and asked if he was "that guy who broke the guitar at the end of the video."

"Freddie Wong is incredible -- oh, my God," said Matthew Ringel, president and commissioner of the World Series of Video Games. "When people learned that Freddie was coming to the event, gamers from across the Internet were just going crazy."

But it's likely that Wong's theatrics did more than make him an Internet icon -- one Dallas judge tried to give his performance an 11 on a scale of one to 10. TV networks are struggling to make competitive gaming more viewer-friendly, and one strategy is to feature games that will translate to a "spectator experience," Ringel said.

But while Wong admits he can provide viewers with a good show, he still takes a more modest approach to the technical side of things.

"To be fair, it's really kind of a fluke," he said. "I'm not even very good at most video games."